


We See You from Behind These Bars (We See You from Behind Our Stars)

by TheVeryLastValkyrie



Series: The Institute of Life and Death [4]
Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-19
Updated: 2016-04-19
Packaged: 2018-06-03 07:19:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6601873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheVeryLastValkyrie/pseuds/TheVeryLastValkyrie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Love can bloom like a flower from a workplace like a dungheap. How to turn a victim into a master assassin, and to whisper through the stock market, and to beat up and break up, and to make an English rose forget to rise for England. References to sadomasochism, torture, previous rape and self-harm, but still rather cheerful for all that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We See You from Behind These Bars (We See You from Behind Our Stars)

Anneliese doesn’t suffer the innocent – she’s never been so herself, so utterly fails to understand them. Queenie can see that in her cold, green eyes, and along with the slowly dawning realisation that that _isn’t_ her name, she’s teaching herself not to bite anyone but Aramis, who likes it, who lies with her with his hot, sticky skin against the parts of her body which are burned beyond feeling him. She looks into Anneliese’s clever eyes and she sees her clever brain turning cartwheels inside her clever skull, and she lets her smooth the golden hair, cropped in line with her chin, that Queenie is having to remember belongs to her.

Don’t pull it.

Don’t pull away.

“You’re ready.” The certainty in de Winter’s voice is thick like cream. “There are more men in the world like the men who hurt you, men who hurt women. Men who steal water and cut down forests and make mothers pay for powdered milk when they have no money. Thugs,” she says succinctly. “And dictators, and corrupt officials. Husbands who beat their wives. Boys who do bad things to girls and film it. What should we do to them?”

“We should make them die.”

“You’re so right.” Relieved of her royal duty, Anneliese turns away and turns around the room, touching the functional grey blinds, the window dressing of desk ornaments. She has a fifties face, a low collar and a low hem and several late-blooming blue bruises. “And we will.”

Aramis has no place in this drab room which looks how it’s supposed to look, like Milady doesn’t have a real place downstairs where she’s beginning to let the man she slaps around slap her back. Does she think a broken bird can’t recognise love? Queenie knows love, it’s bright and pink and it runs over the skin like the brush of soft wool, not silk. The square strip lights pound down on her, the flecked ceiling oppresses her. Aramis should be here, but Aramis has no place here, with the constant clack of hard candies against his teeth and the ream of French poetry, bent paperback edition, nineteen seventy-three, stuffed behind the nearest box of ammo.

“You will.”

Does she speak the words, or does Queenie just hear them? Do they just form themselves out of the subtly striped wallpaper, as she ought to have known they would all along? No one but no one does nothing for nothing, out of kindness, for the innocent.

“Porthos will show you how.”

“Porthos. Yes.”

Yes, Porthos is her friend, because he knows about guns and axes and bricks and blowtorches. He knew, in his pretty way – she’s lost the word she means instead of ‘pretty’ – when that was what she was ready to talk about, when that was everything she was ready to talk about. I shot them. I cut them. I hit them. I burned them.

Did you do it like this?

Like this?

_Like this?_

“Porthos,” she breathes, and smiles. “Yes.”

**.**

“Talk to me.”

“Nice tits.”

“Shut up.”

“I thought you said you wanted me to talk to you?”

Blue-haired (in streaks) and blue-eyed, Constance burns her retinas staring deep into the Dow Jones and waiting, waiting for the price to drop. It’s a code, her code, her delicate system of sales which signify answers to questions, Milady’s network checking in with their mum on a Sunday night. She taps her tongue on the roof of her mouth in time with the beat of her heart, and tries to do binary with the tips of her fingers, but zeroes are hard work and her glasses are dirty and whoomp, there the reply is. There it all is, a universe of numbers, a galaxy of money like a chocolate bar all wrapped up in the foil of respectability.

“I only want you to say nice things.”

“Nice tits.”

“I can blow you up remotely, there is a button.”

“You could blow me remotely instead.”

Long-distance is proving easier than Constance thought it would be. D’Artagnan assumed, when he covered his bony wrists and muscled back with a shirt worth a year’s income for a retail worker on the ‘living’ wage, when he went out into the field proper, that she’d drop him without a second’s notice. Constance Bonacieux can get off to a slow recitation of Pi, he’s seen it happen.

“Where are you?”

“Zurich.”

“Nazi gold?”

“Nazi gold.”

It’s so wrong, somehow, to feel how they feel. Their Wednesday afternoon cinema date has become a ritual which shouldn’t work, but somehow always does. Their mutual masturbation on opposite ends of an encrypted webcam has all the desperation of sweaty teenagers, but you’re only twenty two or three or four (they’ve never gotten around to asking one another) once. She makes bank and he robs banks, and they found each other. She’s sitting in a blacked out van right now, having just made a million selling English tea to China. This shouldn’t be their lives, seats without padding, only bare springs, a Prada briefcase filled with stolen Swiss documents.

“Are we even really that bad?”

“Are we the bad guys, do you mean?”

“Yeah.”

“…nice tits.”

If Constance had met Athos, she might’ve been persuaded to join his gang, like d’Artagnan was. She likes cool, and he sounds cool, not chill but sharp, classic, cut. She might not have been sitting for four hours in front of a screen on a stifling hot day in Rio while her boyfriend was on the opposite side of the world. He might’ve got something blown off for Queen and country and she might’ve had no idea how to make it better. She has no idea how Aramis makes it better.

Or Porthos.

Or Athos.

Or Milady.

Queenie wouldn’t know better if it danced naked in front of her.

“I’m wearing purple knickers.”

“Go on.”

“How much do you miss me?”

“I’ll let you know.”

He still hasn’t cut his hair, she still wants him to.

**.**

_Hey There Delilah_. What sets her off is fucking _Hey there, Delilah, what’s it like in New York City?_ It takes her back to a stained mattress and a tinny radio and to pounding pain, _oh, it’s what you do to me_ when it wasn’t what she did to them, it was what they were doing to her. He was only messing, God bless him, working his way through his back catalogue with a pick to remind her of her favourite songs. Aramis thinks that music is only ever life, not death, that maybe Queenie can find her way back to her life through it.

The buzzing in her ears dies away and he’s spitting blood into a tissue, and his other eye is going to be black. “No,” he insists when she starts to apologise. “We’ve talked about that, you don’t have to do that. You don’t have to be sorry.” She’s much, much younger than him, but it didn’t seem such, such a problem before. It wouldn’t be such a problem now, except she’s young and beautiful.

And Aramis cannot, _cannot_ love her, not like she loves him.

It always ends badly when he loves someone more than he loves himself.

“I don’t want to hurt you.” His girl – how’s my girl? – is wearing lipstick like a lady, but she screeched like a banshee when she smashed her little fists into his face. “I only want to hurt everyone else.”

“I know.” He proffers a sweet between finger and thumb, and she opens her mouth, and he places it inside with an expertness of choreography which means they never touch, not even once.

“Thank you.”

Silence is still better than shrieking. Queenie sucks greedily, crinkling her nose, squeezing her eyes down to slits so she can see the sunny colours he was when she was certifiably mad, not half-crazed like now, when she can be a weapon, a machine.

Aramis would be gorgeous skinned and spread out like a rug, but she’d slash at whoever did that until they were all pieces, even if it was her. Aramis would be gorgeous skinned and wrapped around her like a cloak, and then perhaps she wouldn’t be scared of him ripping her like she rips him. She’d peel him off his bones given half the chance, splash his red everywhere, love him until he went rotten. That’s how much she loves the set of his thick-framed glasses on his nose.

She hasn’t tried to kill herself since he managed to hold her big toe.

**.**

“One more.”

“This is ridiculous.”

“One more.”

“What is this supposed to achieve?”

“ _One more_.” Her serve hasn’t gotten any worse in the time they’ve known each other. It scorches his jaw with no sting in the smack, only pain. She only wants him to listen, apparently. “And this is anything but ridiculous, this is textbook humiliation. I’m taking you back to your pony days, public schoolboy. I’m tempted to make you cry before you piss yourself.”

She’s feeding him jelly and ice cream from a white plastic spoon. Occasionally, Anne (not Anneliese, and that’s the syllable she responds to best, two can play at conditioning) has a lick herself, then takes a lick at Athos, clanging her hands against his ears so the shattering vibrations threaten to burst his eardrums (again, for the second time today).

“You’re too late with the humiliation side of things,” he reports. “That was day three. It’s month six, and this is going to ruin the dinner I had planned.”

Thoughtlessly, none too lightly, she caresses his cheek. “But I know you’re a traitor,” she returns, as calm as calm can be. “And until you learn not to be a traitor, it’s going to be jelly and ice cream, and then ice baths, and then pliers.”

“For fuck’s sake.”

 “You bring this on yourself.” She’s a primary school teacher, keeping him in for break (and it isn’t even wet playtime under her twirly fifties' skirt).

They kept going until he liked it.

They’re still going.


End file.
